


The Sole Unbusy Thing

by tweedisgood



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Morning glory - Freeform, Older Characters, Oral Sex, Retirement, Still at it after all these years
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-04
Updated: 2014-07-04
Packaged: 2018-02-07 11:40:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1897632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tweedisgood/pseuds/tweedisgood
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sussex. 1924. It's a beautiful morning. Holmes needs to get...up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sole Unbusy Thing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flawedamythyst](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flawedamythyst/gifts), [Mazarin221b](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mazarin221b/gifts).



> From a prompt by flawedamythyst via mazarin221b: "The birds and bees"
> 
> "All nature seems at work ... The bees are stirring--birds are on the wing ... and I the while, the sole unbusy thing, not honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, _Work without Hope (1825)_

“Ah. You’re awake. It’s a beautiful morning.”

It was. Light flooded the room, the whitewashed walls of our cottage gleamed as if fresh-painted. Outside on a tree branch, a little goldfinch was singing its heart out. A solitary, exploratory bee floated idly in through the open window and circled Sherlock Holmes’ hawk’s beak of a nose two or three times before deciding not to investigate its cavities for pollen. It busied itself instead amongst the vase of stocks which I had, somewhat to my beloved’s disapproval, set on the nightstand. Their perfume had all but faded, but their watercolour hues yet remained. Holmes regarded flowers in the house, or at any rate in the bedroom, as an eccentricity. He once suggested thistles as more appropriate, “one more or less prick being neither here nor there, so long as we have at least the two essential.”

There was a reason that _I_ was in charge of the flower garden.

Holmes stretched ostentatiously, his long, thin limbs taking up most of the available space, and yawned until his jaw cracked. Satisfied with both excesses, he turned over and closed his eyes, murmuring:

“Think of all the sorry slaves crowding onto station platforms at this very moment, John. But we – we are retired! ‘All nature seems at work ... The bees are stirring--birds are on the wing ... and I the while, the sole unbusy thing, not honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.’”

Indeed? We should see about that.

“Perhaps you ought to be stirring. Such as when I do this-“, running my open palm up his leg from ankle to knee to cup the bony patella, squeezing with delicate insinuation. His breath, steady from the edge of sleep, caught. His nightshirt had rucked up past mid-thigh from the twisting and turning of the restless sleeper, his unconscious mind running still at speed in who-knew what strange dream factories. I took shameless advantage and lifted the linen still higher.

His skin was still so fine. Like skimmed cream in sunshine, bone by moonlight, the pallor of his complexion he protected from the sun’s assaults to bronze and burn even as he worked outside day after day in the open air. There was the suggestion of softness here and there, now. Not spare flesh, never that, but no more did I fear, did I hope, to cut myself on his sharp edges, to be marked forever from the crush of our bodies, from the glorious struggles born from a passion that never waned, that only waxed with the years, with the intimate familiarity of call and response.

He let me worship him, for he knew his worth – to me, to himself. Pride is a sin, they say: but in love, pride is essential. How can we, hating ourselves, truly love another? He knew how I admired him, body and soul both. It pleased him to hear me say so, to feel my lips and hands telling it every way I knew.

“Up. Up. Up. Wake up, get up, cock up at attention, Holmes, that’s right. I want you this morning. I want you to be wanted, to be ready to be had. You are positively glowing, my heart: how slick your back is. Dripping fit to need the sweat licked off you. It’s warm enough without clothes, without covers, without even sheets. Off with them, let me look.”

Naked, unshaven, wild-haired and rough-eyed, stripped to his skin, civilisation was far away. A man like any other, but like no other in the history of mankind. Himself, and mine. We knelt together, swaying on the mattress, drunk with love, holding each other up. Face to face, chest to chest, cocks brushing with every embrace, we kissed for the first time, the thousandth time, sweet as honey.

Taste and touch enjoyed all the places on his body that begged for them – stark collarbones, tender wrists and throat, the prow of his widow’s peak; the plane of his cheek. He shivered and shuddered in my arms, holding back from too much display, turning his face to my shoulder to let out a helpless groan as I combed through the crisp hair at his groin and grazed just the tips of my fingers around the solid root of him, tickling and teasing it harder, fuller. My hands were as full as my heart. No-one else but me had ever known this in the history of mankind’s love for his own kind. Myself, and his.

“Thirty years ago you’d have me pinned against the bed-end by now.”

His hands gripped my shoulders tight with the memory of it. Our present pleasures were not so swift nor so brutal– our joints could no longer stand it. We built them slowly, but all the more surely. Both of us had seen seventy summers pass in the gardens of England, in its sweltering London streets and close-curtained private chambers. Fortunately, lust, whose true home is the imagination, finds a way to overcome the frailties of age.

Rolling onto my back on the crumpled sheet, I slid down so that he was astride me, so he could feed me the tip, then inch my inch the shaft, of his eager prick, guiding it into my mouth with his hands over mine, breathing deeply into every soft thrust and sighing as he pulled back, fucking me with gentle precision. Pinned I was, but by his expression, fierce as fire, self-possessed as a housecat, holding me down just as surely as his strong arms had done in our prime, each movement that gave him most pleasure signalled clear in the clenching of his jaw or the tight line of arm and hand as he clasped his own thigh, taking care not to make more weight for my game shoulder As if I would have noticed the pain. Well, perhaps I might, even so. I am only human, merely the husband of a godling. But I would have borne that wound with joy, as much as any of the ones past, for the sake of his great heart, for the sake of his desire for me.

Together, a nesting pair that summer morning, we built up to our crises. First bliss came to me as I stripped a delicious rolling spasm out of every last nerve in my balls and spilled thick seed that would never fruit except to make more love. Then at the last, held firm in my hand and suckling, humming mouth, high and full-throated as any bird in a bush, Sherlock Holmes sang.


End file.
